Sacramental Anxiety in Richard II and the Comedy of Errors Aria Casey [email protected]

Seton Hall University eRepository @ Seton Hall Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs) Spring 5-19-2018 Sacramental Anxiety in Richard II and The Comedy of Errors Aria Casey [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.shu.edu/dissertations Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Casey, Aria, "Sacramental Anxiety in Richard II and The omeC dy of Errors" (2018). Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs). 2542. https://scholarship.shu.edu/dissertations/2542 SACRAMENTAL ANXIETY IN RICHARD II AND THE COMEDY OF ERRORS Aria Casey M. A. Seton Hall University, 2018 A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Master of Arts In The Department of English Seton Hall University May, 2018 Casey 2 © Aria Casey, May 2018 All Rights Reserved Casey 3 Seton Hall University Department of English College of Arts and Sciences This Thesis, Sacramental Anxiety in Richard II and The Comedy of Errors, by Aria Casey has been approved for submission for the Degree of Master of Arts in English—Literature by: Approved by: ________________________ Dr. Donovan Sherman, Thesis Advisor ____________________________________ Dr. Angela Weisl, Second Reader Casey 4 Abstract Following England’s break from the Catholic Church in 1534, Protestant thought gradually transformed the English Church’s understanding of sacraments. The influence of Reformation thinkers such as Thomas Cranmer, the author of The Book of Common Prayer, propelled the idea that that a ritual is only as good as the worthiness of a recipient. Ritual, the “outer” component of a sacrament, now had the potential to be distant from divine favor, the “inner” component of a sacrament. This potential distance caused anxiety over the authenticity of sacraments, affecting English thought well into Shakespeare’s day. Shakespeare’s plays Richard II and The Comedy of Errors both struggle with sacramental anxiety in ways that challenge the fruitfulness of sacramental rituals: the anointing of a king, marriage, and baptism. Sacramental anxiety plagues not only (un-staged) sacred ceremonies of baptism, marriage, and the anointing of a king in these two plays, but even more so plagues the “ceremonies” of words, “rituals” of behavior, and “forms” of faces: the words, acts, and looks of a person became more greatly suspect, all the more capable of deceiving, of being mismatched to the inner true character. Casey 5 Sacramental Anxiety in Richard II and The Comedy of Errors Following England’s break from the Catholic Church in 1534, Protestant thought gradually transformed the English Church’s understanding of sacraments. Only two of the Catholic seven sacraments, Baptism and the Eucharist, remained recognized sacraments following the English Reformation. The influence of Reformation thinkers such as Thomas Cranmer, the author of The Book of Common Prayer, propelled the idea that that a ritual is only as good as the worthiness of a recipient; that the outward sign may not correspond to inward grace (Jeanes 30), undermining any guarantee of grace once understood by the performing of the rituals necessary to sacraments. Sacrament is defined by the 1559 Book of Common Prayer as “an outward and visible Signe of an Inward and Spirtuall grace given unto us; ordained by Christ himselfe, as a means whereby we receive the same, and a pledge to assure us thereof” (71), but this meeting point between “inner” and “outer” as well as between human and God grew increasingly elusive in Protestant England. Ritual, the “outer” component of a sacrament, now had the potential to be distant from divine favor, the “inner” component of a sacrament. This potential distance caused anxiety over the authenticity of sacraments, affecting English thought well into Shakespeare’s day. Shakespeare’s plays Richard II and The Comedy of Errors both struggle with sacramental anxiety in ways that challenge the fruitfulness of sacramental rituals: the anointing of a king, marriage, and baptism. Baptism, as the initiation of a person into Christianity, is a moment of definition of that individual; a drowning of the old self and a rebirth into a new life within the new limits of Christ’s body. Marriage, likewise, is a redefining of the self in the body and soul of another. The anointing of a king was never a sacrament for Catholics nor Elizabethan Protestants, but had a sacramental tradition—that is, a tradition of being sacred but not counted Casey 6 as a sacrament—and after England’s break from Rome and the Pope, the sovereign, as a ruler anointed by God, became increasingly central to English religious thought, through the time of Queen Elizabeth. In Shakespeare’s plays Richard II and The Comedy of Errors, sacramental anxiety plagues not only (un-staged) sacred ceremonies of baptism, marriage, and the anointing of a king, but even more so the “ceremonies” of words, “rituals” of behavior, and “forms” of faces: the words, acts, and looks of a person became more greatly suspect, all the more capable of deceiving, of being mismatched to the inner true character. In this way, the sacramental anxiety of the “outer” not matching the “inner” cascades down to far below the ceremony proper. Ernst Kantorowicz says that Richard II is “the tragedy of the King’s Two Bodies” (26). The political and theological theory that a king has two bodies stems from the Middle Ages, when a distinction was made between the body politic and the body natural of a sovereign. The body politic is the immortal office of the king, it is the “sovereign spirit” who is reincarnated again and again in each successive king. The body natural is the physical, temporal body of a king, the body that can become ill and age, and can die. Each body is possessed by a king at the time of his rule, the body politic bestowed upon his anointment. Since the king is anointed by God, his office can be immortal as an extension of God’s eternal nature. In the early years of the English Reformation, beginning in 1534 with Henry VIII’s declaration of authority over the English Church, the dual notion of kingship not only continued to be an important legal concept, but the increase of the king’s church power meant a heightened emphasis on the immortal “body” of England’s sovereign. The movement of these two kingly “bodies” in Richard II from bodies fully possessed by Richard to the two bodies Richard has lost challenges the integrity of the two-body political fiction while expressing the anxiety surrounding sacraments as introduced by Reformation Casey 7 thinkers like Cranmer. This is because these kingly bodies supposedly make up one indivisible unit (Kantorowicz 9), but Richard loses them separately, one at his deposition and one at his murder. In this way, King Richard becomes an object of sacramental anxiety himself in Richard II. The scrutiny of the agreement between the “inner” and the “outer”—the form and the spirit, the ritual and the grace—is present in this “tragedy of the kings two bodies,” and also in Shakespearean plays tonally distant, such as The Comedy of Errors, in which a confusion of identity is intertwined with sacramental images of baptism and marriage. The sacramental anxiety in these plays is the anxiety of the efficaciousness of the outer when the inner cannot be known. Kantorowicz argues that Richard moves between the roles of the King, the Fool, and God throughout the play (27). These splits in Richard occur as his kingly authority crumbles, with the deposition scene “of sacramental solemnity, since the ecclesiastical ritual of undoing the effects of consecration is no less solemn or of less weight than the ritual which has built up the sacramental dignity” (35). Kantorowicz also discusses a parallel between Bolingbroke-Richard and Pilate-Christ, offering the insight that: The Son of man, despite his humiliation and the mocking' remained the deus absconditus, remained the “concealed God” with regard to inner man, just as Shakespeare’s Richard would trust for a moment’s length in his concealed inner kingship. This inner kingship, however, dissolved too…Richard realizes that he…has his place among the Pilates and Judases, because he is no less a traitor than the others, or is even worse than they are…. (38) Richard’s King-Fool-God roles are each played in desperate attempts to hold onto himself in some way, culminating in a realization that he is a traitor for undoing his sacred anointment. Casey 8 Kantorowicz cites “kingship in name only” as one of the levels of lessening status that Richard experiences several times throughout the play. Kantorowicz careful analysis of Richard’s metamorphosing self-perceptions as they relate to the notion of a king’s two bodies brings forth the insecurity of Richard’s identity as a king despite having been appointed by God. At the same time, this realization that he is a traitor to himself and his proceeding despair are part of what makes Richard a sort of messianic martyr by the end of the play. The king’s anointing was sacred since the Middle Ages, but after the start of the English Reformation increasingly gained the esteem of a real sacrament, even filling the void of “real presence” once filled by the Eucharist. Richard C. McCoy in Alterations of State: Sacred Kingship in the English Reformation continues the examination of sacramental kingship in Shakespeare with his reading of Hamlet. While Kantorowicz’s book, as suggested by its subtitle, A Study in Medieval Political Theology, focuses on the medieval roots of this understanding of kingship, McCoy focuses on the political and theological idea of a two-bodied kingship as it developed in Shakespeare’s day.

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